For me, Italy will always be a land of romance, tomato sauce, and women with very short tempers. I was stationed in Naples in southern Italy in the late 1950s and early ’60s. I blame a lot of my subsequent development on the horrors of working for the fattest, laziest UFO (Ugly Female Officer) in the Navy; the horror of that early assignment propelled me to frogman training, and far exceeded any combat situation I faced in later years. If ever I lack motivation for a PT session, the mental image of her butt cheeks flapping in the breeze never fails to get me in gear.
I returned to the Land of Garlic and Oregano several times in my Navy career, with both the SEALs and Red Cell, running training operations, security drills, and a few things I can’t tell you about unless I shoot you first. All in all, I love Italy, especially when someone else is paying for me to be there.
My decision to attend the NATO conference was influenced by the fact that Karen Fairfield had already signed up for the four-day session set for mid-March. Besides being my main squeeze, light of my life, and far-better half, Karen heads Homeland Insecurity’s Office of Internal Security Affairs (OISA). Her boss assigned her to go to the conference because he had to be out of town attending his son’s wedding; her only role there would be to smile at the receptions and try not get lost while touring the Roman ruins. I’d already toyed with the idea of joining her when the invitation arrived. Making suitable arrangements with the NATO pooh-bahs took all of five minutes; they agreed not only to find a nice hotel outside of Rome but to stock the minibar with Bombay Sapphire. I took care of reserving the Ferrari myself.
A midlevel NATO functionary named Colonel Boffo Buffano met us when we arrived after an overnight flight at Fuminico airport. Flanked by a pair of Italian soldiers, we were whisked through customs, and after battling the morning rush-hour traffic found ourselves relaxing in a Renaissance-era castle cum ultramodern hotel. Karen has an especially good cure for jet lag; after we indulged in it, we headed out for a late lunch with an old friend, Dr. Paolo A. Bolognese. I met him in Rome back when I had SEAL Six and he was surgeon for the Italian army carabinieri battalion; we were there to do a takedown on an aircraft and he was standing by to fix any boo-boos. The doc now heads the Department of Neurosurgery at North Shore University Hospital back in Lung Island, Noo Yawk, and is associate director of the Chiari Institute, the place to go if your brain or spinal cord ever gets kinked. He happened to be over in his native land to chat about something called “laser doppler flowmetry applied neurological interoperative ultrasound.” In plain English, he can peel a brain like an onion, one layer at a time.
The doc started talking about new techniques over lunch. He had me lost until he compared what he did to taking apart IEDs and booby traps. He may do heads, but I still do kneecaps, and we had a great time talking about our respective specialties.
After lunch, Karen and I headed over to the opening reception at Villa d’Este in Tivoli, a typically over-the-top Italian garden that has impressed visitors with a mortar-range view of Rome since 1572. Festivities began the way every NATO military operation ought to—hors d’oeuvres and cocktails. My idea of an appetizer is Bombay Sapphire straight; our Italian hosts were happy to oblige.
Counterterrorism has become a bit of a growth industry of late, and cocktail hour allowed me to meet some of the new blood in the field. The Poles and Germans are always good for a few laughs, and I was impressed with a few young turks from Romania, of all places. And then there was Baucus Dosdière, a runty dark-skinned Belgian by way of Morocco and France, who had recently been hired by the Vatican to oversee a counterterror squad for the Holy See. You may laugh—I know I did—but if there’s an organization that knows a thing or two about terror, it’s the Catholic Church; these are the folks who brought the world the Spanish Inquisition, after all.
If you muck with the spelling a bit, Dosdière translates pretty literally as “Backass” in French, and the name fit him. Though he had white European ancestors—it’s amazing the things people tell you during cocktail hour—Backass’s native African blood predominated. In his estimation, this had helped him win his job from the cardinal overseeing his office, either because Africa was underrepresented in the Church hierarchy or the cardinal misapplied the theory “it takes one to know one.” Backass hinted heavily that it was the latter, and he had enough of a sense of humor to enjoy the joke. He had spent his childhood in northern Africa and the Middle East, where one of his grandfathers had been a high-ranking French foreign legion officer and his uncle had worked as a diplomat. He apparently had family connections with old money in the Middle East and Belgium; I guess he was literally the dark sheep of the family. He’d worked for the Moroccan Security Force as a very young man, then gone to work for two different private security firms, including one that had helped reorganize the Gendarmerie of the State of Vatican City, which brought him to his present job.
Tourists are familiar with the Pontifical Swiss Guard, the guys who hold long curtain rods and dress like they stepped out of an opera. Most of their job is to look good, and while they do protect the pope, the heavy-duty police requirements are generally handed over to the Gendarmerie of the State of Vatican City. External security is handled primarily by Italy’s Inspectorate of Public Security to the Vatican State. A new organization had been formed to handle terrorist threats both in and outside of Vatican City. Supposedly, the pope had decided to clean house after rumors surfaced of connections between the old security chiefs and a shadowy neofascist group known as Parco dei Principi, or more colloquially as P2, or, in English, “Power Brokers.”
(Don’t bother going to your Italian-English dictionaries, it doesn’t translate exactly. But that’s not the only thing that’s twisted about P2. Supposedly, the group was formed after World War II and adopted a strategy of continual warfare in hopes that eventually the people would clamor for the return of a Mussolini type. There were connections literally all over the place, even to the U.S. and the beloved Christians In Action, also known as the CIA. The conspiracy is too wild and woolly to lay out here; the important thing is that the pope and some of the clerics around him wanted a fresh face from outside Italy, and that helped Backass get the job.)
Backass answered to a cardinal and a committee of clerics, none of whom knew much about security except that they didn’t want to spend any money on it. He had been tasked with improving security at St. Peter’s Basilica, but couldn’t directly control the security force there or even appoint his own deputies. Not that things in Vatican City should be any different than anywhere else in the world.
Backass took a shine to Karen—can’t blame him there—and started talking to her about Rome, asking what she’d seen and was interested in. Somehow the conversation veered toward places to eat. Backass unleashed a string of rapid-fire opinions, offering advice on what dish to order where and how to deal with the notoriously finicky waiters. Finally, he mentioned Gabi di Gabi, a froufrou place Karen had read about in a magazine on the flight over.
Karen winked at me and said she’d just love to eat there, figuring that would get him to shut up. Instead he pulled out his cell phone, called the restaurant, and made a reservation; we even ended up eating on the Catholic Church’s dime, which is either a joke or a reason to go to confession, I’m not sure which. Afterward, we took a ride through the hills above the capital, putting the vintage Ferrari through its paces as we wended our way back to the hotel. Rome isn’t the tropics, but March can be quite nice, and the starlit evening was everything we had imagined. With the top down, there was just enough of a chill to encourage Karen to lean closer for warmth. We arrived back at the hotel in time for a nightcap, then repaired to the battlements for a night of la dolce vita.
My speech wasn’t scheduled until the next evening. After working up a bit of a sweat in the castle’s dungeon the next morning, Karen and I did the tourist thing, heading to the Coliseum to gawk at the place where lions and Christians once held family picnics. We strolled through the ruins of the Forum
, the original center of Roman bureaucracy and the judicial system. The paper pushers and stone chiselers may be long gone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the cases filed during Caesar’s time are still waiting their turn on the docket. I’m not much of a tourist—I like to pillage if not rape when I’m visiting a country, and anything less seems like a waste. But Karen reveled in it, imagining she heard the roar of the Goths approaching as she walked amid the ruins.
That may just have been the lousy Italian drivers, who race through the city faster than half the cars on the NASCAR circuit. We escaped with our lives as we walked to the conference, which was being held in Mussolini’s old haunts at the Palazzo Venezia. Il Duce is said to haunt the hallways, probably looking for a lost train schedule. We didn’t run into the ghost, but we did happen upon the same American Delta Force troopers who had freed Italian hostages from Iraqi captors a few months before. They were here to get a well-deserved pat on the rump from the political types. Meeting the Delta boys was an honor and a privilege. I was lucky enough to call the man who established Delta Force, Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, a friend, and I’m sure he would have been pleased with these young heroes, who even at the ceremony were insisting they’d done “nothing special, but our jobs.”
I also met the ambassador to Italy, Gordon G. White, and his charming wife, Petra. White had been a political appointee—read, big fund-raiser—but I didn’t hold that against him, especially after he announced that he was a big fan of my books, beginning with “the first and best, Rogue Warrior.” You know how modest I am, so of course I immediately began to blush and ask for another drink. I also checked my wallet, because usually when a political type compliments you, it’s going to end up costing you big bucks down the line. But White wasn’t like that, or at least was damn subtle about it. He introduced me to the resident head spook (a waste case; I won’t even go into it) and a Brit MI6 man whom I actually already knew, though we both acted as if it were the first time we’d met. The MI6 agent—I’ll call him Shakespeare—nudged me aside a minute or two later and showed me a printout. I glanced at it long enough to realize it was a diatribe about the need for “war with the crusaders.” There was no signature, and I didn’t make the connection to Saladin until he refreshed my memory about the tanker strike back in December.
Shakespeare had been among the people I’d told about the faxes, and we exchanged info dumps on Saladin. He knew a lot more than I did, connecting him to a loose network of Islamic terror groups. Besides the Malaysian gas tanker explosion, he was supposed to have supplied money to groups involved in an attack in South Africa and the American embassy in Spain. An Egyptian group opposed to the government had posted communiqués similar to his (and exploiting the same security holes in the host computer systems) on Egyptian government computers. Shakespeare believed Saladin was spreading money around in various ways, supplying funds to operations in Europe and Asia. Especially ominous, in Shakespeare’s opinion, was his funding of religious schools in Pakistan and Muslim charities in India—activities that had once helped bin Laden climb to the pinnacle of the movement. Saladin was bidding to make himself the indispensable caliph in the coming millennium. And we didn’t even know his real name.
Time out for half a second while I address a common misconception regarding money. Most of us tend to think of six- and seven-digit sums when we hear talk about terrorists and their funding networks. We know (or think we know) how much it costs to equip antiterrorist units and naturally assume it costs the same or more for the bad guys. The truth is, terrorism in most cases is a low-budget operation. The help comes cheap and most of the necessary tools of the trade are in good supply, whether you’re talking about AK-47s or the chemicals necessary to blow things up. A few thousand dollars represents a good hunk of change for your typical tango. Even the high-profile “actions”—such as the obscene attack on New York and Washington, D.C., on 9/11—cost no more than fifty thousand dollars, all told. (It cost the United States approximately $80 billion and still counting—pretty good return if you’re into economics.) That’s not chicken scratch to me, and I doubt it is to you, but the point is that a few dollars here and a few thousand there skimmed from a seemingly legitimate charity group—which these bastards have done for years—makes a significant contribution to the cause. And that’s not even to mention the “coincidence” of such groups employing people sympathetic to terror networks. One of the ways we ought to be fighting terrorism is by clamping down on the supposed charities using American money to bite us in the ass, and worse. We’ve taken a fitful start over the course of the past year, but we’re still way too worried about public opinion outside the U.S. to make the dent in the revenue stream that we need to.
Lecture over. I’ll put the soapbox away.
Shakespeare produced another Web page. The address had been faxed to al-Jazeera a few hours earlier. (It would turn out that I got one, too, though I didn’t know it at the time.) The page was in English. Saladin predicted a “major blow to the heart of the crusader empire” at “a time of their choosing.”
“They pick the place and we pick the place?” I asked Shakespeare.
He didn’t understand what I meant at first, and I had to show him the words, “a time of their choosing.”
“Should be ‘our’ choosing. Obviously, he should spend a little more money on translators,” Shakespeare said.
“What do you think the target will be?”
The MI6 operative shrugged. There were too many possibilities.
“Very few people are taking Saladin very seriously,” added Shakespeare, walking to the bar for a refill. “Your own CIA thinks he’s an egotistical windbag taking credit for others’ achievements. Such as they are.”
“Sure. Who wouldn’t want to take credit for mayhem and murder?”
“I think he’s real,” said Shakespeare. “And he’s somewhere in Europe. I think he’s doing more than supplying people with money. I think he’ll launch a big attack—a very big attack—very soon.”
“Are you saying that on general principles, or because you have hard information?”
Our quiet corner had become considerably less so, and Shakespeare frowned as he looked at some of the people nearby.
“Tomorrow,” he suggested. “At a more private location.”
We agreed to meet in the afternoon, then went back to mixing with the hoi polloi. A half hour later we were ushered into the ballroom next door, where we were served a seven-course dinner. It wasn’t until the waiters were hustling around with espresso that the “business” portion of the evening began with the ceremony honoring the Delta people. Then came what for most was the purpose of the evening: A succession of speeches from various state security chiefs proclaimed what a great job they had done over the past six months following the capture and immediate suicide of Sheikh Abu Abdullah, known to the West as Osama bin Laden. There was so much backslapping going on that I was surprised they didn’t have a chiropractor on call.
When my turn came to speak I walked to the front of the room, took my speech out of my pocket, looked at it, then ripped it in half. Somebody had to be the skunk at the party, and it looked like it was me.
“I think I ought to start by saying that the work capturing Osa-my-butt’s Been Eaten was the best SpecWar activity I’ve seen, bar none,” I told the audience. “The American, Italian, and Pakistani units that worked together to pull it off deserve all the recognition they’ve received. We’ve seen great work over the last year and a half by countless SpecWar outfits across the world, most of whom can’t be mentioned because their operations remain highly classified.”
Everyone figured that I was going to extend the orgy of self-congratulation and applauded loudly. I let them enjoy themselves for a bit before continuing.
“But our struggle is far from over. On the contrary, it’s more dangerous now. Every whack job in Islam is vying to become raghead in chief.”
Some of the people in the room smiled. A lot more grimaced, w
hether because they couldn’t follow my vernacular or they sensed where I was going, I couldn’t say.
“We’re only in the first stages of battle, the very early beginning. We haven’t gotten serious. And we need to. We have a very limited opportunity, while the opposition is still relatively disorganized, to stop the war from getting to the point where the non-Muslim countries of the world—NATO, the U.S., Russia—reach the point that the only way to deal with the opposition effectively is to retaliate in a massive way. I’m not talking about what happened in Afghanistan or Iraq. I’m not talking about taking over Chechnya. I’m thinking about what right now is unthinkable, what’s off-limits because we don’t want to work out the logic of the situation. I’m talking about the sort of retribution that would take place—that would have to take place—if the people who are employing terrorism for their purposes actually began to threaten Western civilization and large parts of the population in a serious way.
“Let’s state the problem directly. If the successor to bin Laden exploded a nuclear weapon here in Rome, how would NATO respond? Would nuking Mecca be out of the question? If Moscow were covered by a nuclear cloud, and the guts of the weapon were shown to have come from Iran, would the retaliation end when Chechnya was turned into dust?”
More than a few people gasped. Even though these were professional soldiers and military leaders, most didn’t want to face the implications of the threats the Islamic extremists had made. They didn’t think what I was talking about was possible. They saw, or wanted to see, the struggle they were involved in as a series of small, isolated fights that could be dealt with incrementally—a firefight here, a raid there. Even after 9/11 and the Madrid train bombings, they didn’t take the extremists’ capabilities or their rantings seriously. Of course, Europeans had made that mistake with extremists before, in this very hall.
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